So, Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals and three entities. Let’s look at this a bit closer. In an indictment announced Friday in Washington, Mueller describes a years-long, multimillion-dollar conspiracy by hundreds of Russians aimed at criticizing Hillary Clinton and supporting Senator Bernie Sanders and Trump. More accurate, I suspect, would be to s […]

With the help of Dakinikat’s and Riverdaughter’s posts and my own reading, I’ve been trying to understand what is happening to our economy and how that is going to affect Americans. I came across an economist and historian named Michael Hudson who used to work on Wall Street and is now a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC).

Hudson is really good at explaining the financial disaster we are going though, and he does it in plain English. In the interview posted below (taped yesterday in London) Hudson argues that governments around the world are deliberately shortchanging their own economies, because the financial sector give so much to politicians. Here’s the money quote (it appears about 4:54):

“…the largest contributor to the political campaigns is the financial sector, and the government has a choice: they can save the economy or or they can save the creditors who made the bad loans. They’ve said, ‘We don’t care about the economy; we’re bailing out the creditors. That’s our constituency.”

Here’s another interview with Hudson by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. This one is from February 15. In this interview Hudson explains in more detail why Obama’s recovery plan is “awful.” It is the “greatest transfer of wealth in American history,” and it is turning the U.S. into an oligarchy with a whole new class of wealthy financiers.

In the end, says Hudson, the debts will have to be written off; because you simply can’t get blood from a stone. If people don’t have the money to pay their mortgages, they can’t pay them. In the meantime, Obama is pouring trillions of dollars of our tax money into the banks.

What can we do about it? I don’t know, but I agree with RD and Dakinikat that we all have to get up to speed on economics as best we can. This country is in real trouble, and the “vast majority of baby boomers have accumulated little to no wealth.” These people are close to retirement, and their houses have lost value and their 401Ks are in the crapper.

And the combination of falling house and stock values means that the vast majority of people near retirement have accumulated little or no wealth, meaning they will be almost completely reliant on Social Security and Medicare to support them in their retirement years.

These are the findings of “The Wealth of the Baby Boom Cohorts After the Collapse of the Housing Bubble,” a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a non-partisan research firm.

We cannot allow the rapidly developing Obamagarchy to destroy social security and medicare just as we are very likely headed into a Depression that could be worse than the Great Depression my parents lived through. And we are more poorly prepared now than people were at the time of the 1929 crash. In those days, people had some savings. We are really going to have to stick together as a people and remind ourselves again and again that this is our country. It doesn’t belong to Obama or to the bankers. This land is our land.

There must be something in the Kool-aid over at MyDD, cuz Chuckie Lemos isn’t the only one that’s a few french fries short of a Happy Meal. From Todd Beeton:

A new Gallup poll taken the day of and the two days following President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, finds the President’s approval rating has jumped up 8 points to 67% and his disapproval has dropped 4 points to 21% from the prior 3-day period. Obama’s term-high approval rating was 69% just after his inauguration.

While Todd is having an obagasm over an alleged 8 point jump in Teh Precious’ approval rating, he glosses over the part that shows Obama has dropped two points in just one month. At that rate Obama will be under 50% by Christmas. He also ignores the fact that the poll shows that Obama’s “support” is extremely volatile.

Personally, I don’t pay much attention to polls at any time, but right now they are meaningless. Obama’s approval rating won’t matter until the November 2010 mid-term election, and even then they aren’t an indicator of what will happen in 2012. At the two-year mark George H. W. Bush had a 90% approval rating but he lost when he ran for reelection. Bill Clinton’s approval rating was low in 1994 but he was reelected in 1996.

A video showing a King County Sheriff’s deputy pummeling a 15-year-old girl in a holding cell was released Friday over the strenuous objections of the officer’s attorney.

“We had argued strenuously that the videotape released to the media this morning not be released because it does not tell the whole story of the incident,” attorney Anne Bremner said in a statement.

[…]

“As we argued to the judge, it will inflame public opinion and will severely impact the deputy’s right to a fair trial.”

The video shows Schene and Brunner as they escorted the girl into the holding cell. Schene had asked her to remove her basketball shoes, and, as she slipped out of her left shoe, she appeared to kick it at Schene.

Schene then lunged through the door and kicked her, striking either her stomach or upper thigh area, court documents say. He pushed her against a corner wall before flinging her to the floor by her hair. He then squatted down on her and made “two overhead strikes,” although it’s unclear where the blows landed.

I’ll bet the thug’s attorney objected. Video like that is highly prejudicial and likely to convince a jury that he is guilty. Without the video that girl would just another criminal who “resisted arrest.”

Well, my sistren and brethren, after a month of “Hope and “Change,” are you feeling sufficiently represented by your new “progressive” government?

In my case, the answer to that question is a resounding, “Hell, no!”

Legislatively, the Obama Administration has failed to impress. The Lilly Ledbetter Act finally passed, but without the Paycheck Fairness Act, it’s only good for punishing employers after they have already been paying women less based on their sex. To make a real change in the daily lives of women and their families, we needed the tougher regulations the Paycheck Fairness Act would have imposed. As for the fabled stimulus package, when the President wanted to garner Republican votes, how did he reach across the aisle? By cutting Planned Parenthood funding, which helps poor women gain access to birth control. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was furious at this betrayal, stating in an interview that cutting the funding actually increased the size of the stimulus bill by $700 million.

Struggling with Links, Blockquotes, images or videos?

Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

Last month's weird story about a raid on Newsweek/IBT offices was followed by David Sirota's announcement that he was resigning the publications. It seems management was playing a bit fast and loose with the laws on fraud and money laundering. "Newsweek's Top Editors and a Reporter Let Go Amid Turmoil: Less than a week after both the chai […]